


And They'll Sing in Grateful Chorus

by duchessofthemoonbase



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Gen, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-19 20:56:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5980701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duchessofthemoonbase/pseuds/duchessofthemoonbase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sybbie votes for the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And They'll Sing in Grateful Chorus

            Sybbie Branson wakes up that autumn morning with a new sense of confidence about her. She just turned twenty-one this spring. This is the first election she’ll be allowed to vote in.

            She’s been waiting for this day for months now, researching the candidates and engaging in the occasionally intense political argument with George and Marigold over luncheon at the abbey. They see voting as a perfunctory task, the whole democratic system as only a cog in the clock that is Britain, but Sybbie sees it as so much more.

            When she strides into the village to cast her ballot, she sees the people staring. She remembers that people have always thought of her as hard to categorize as the daughter of a great lady and a chauffeur. The kind of woman whose voting habits people would wonder about.

            The people here, and everywhere outside of Downton Abbey, call her Sybil as opposed to Sybbie, and when she hears the name it makes her feel like she’s been mistaken for a queen. So she embraces it, feels her mother’s spirit urging her forward, and she fights. Fights for herself, and for those who cannot. Another war has come, this one even worse than the one her parents survived, and she can see the concern in the villagers faces as they read the reports of the Blitz raging on. They would live through this war too, and she hoped a better England would lie on the other side of it.

            When Sybbie closes the curtain of the voting booth she grins. She scribbles the names of her chosen candidates on the ballot. She thinks of all her father’s stories; the ones about the suffragette pamphlets and the harem pants, the ones of her mother sneaking out to demonstrations and speaking out at the dinner table. Her mother never lived long enough to get to do this. But she had fought with all her heart so that Sybbie could.

            Sybbie slips the ballot into the box and looks up at the ceiling.

            “ _Thank you_ ,” she whispers.


End file.
